Why It's So Darn Hard To Hire A Decent Engineer – Even In This HORRIBLE Job Market

Unemployment in the United States is still at a brutal 9.6%, but
for software engineers the job market couldn't look much better.

Everyone in tech knows that there is a serious engineering
deficit, but apparently no one outside tech knows about
it, so new talent isn't flooding in to fill the demand. We've
heard from startups like HowAboutWe
that have already secured series A funding, and are offering
equity, and are still struggling to find good engineers. Paul
Dix, a former Google
engineer who is launching his own startup, Market.io, tells us he gets multiple job
calls per week even though all his public profiles explicitly say
not to bother him.

An anecdote to show just how severe this has become: last week,
we happened to mention we were working on this story to a junior
VC we were meeting with. He promptly opened up his backpack and
pulled out a copy of Ruby on Rails for Dummies.

It's difficult to see how the market for programming talent could
be so far out of sync with the wider job market. One would expect
wages (or, in the case of early-stage startups, equity offers)
for programmers to rise, encouraging more people to learn these
skills until the demand was met.

The most obvious cause of increased software developer demand is
that the Internet is still rapidly growing; the tech sector
accounts for an ever bigger chunk of the economy. Young companies
like Google have created thousands of new programming jobs. More
recently, Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga have been throwing money
at every engineer they can find.

But the problem is especially bad in the startup community,
because of the surge in early stage funding. Getting new consumer
web companies off the ground is vastly cheaper today than it was
just a few years ago; as a result, venture capitalists and angel
investors are increasingly focused on seed stage investments.
Since such investments are much smaller than later round ones,
that means far more companies are getting funded, and they all
need engineers to get them up and running.

This puts non-technical entrepreneurs in a very tough position.
The conventional wisdom these days is that great startup ideas
are a dime a dozen, and that what matters is execution. Seed
funding, meanwhile, is
incredibly easy to come by. So a top notch Ruby developer has
very little incentive to help you execute your brilliant idea,
when he could just as easily start his own company and get
funded.

Supply

The more difficult question is why the market hasn't met this
surging demand for programmers. A few of the problems:

A small part of the problem can be accounted for by the fact
that the supply of skilled labor simply can't change overnight.
You can't become a top-notch programmer overnight, and becoming
skilled and proven takes years. Of course, this
explanation only goes so far, because, with a few brief
exceptions after the last two market crashes, this shortage has
been around and acute for the past decade.

Evan Korth, a computer science professor at NYU and cofounder
of HackNY, tells us that
people outside of tech, and college students in particular, are
largely ignorant of how lucrative the opportunities are for
programmers. This partly the result of stale media narratives, he
thinks. In 1999, everyone was told that becoming a computer geek
was the path to riches. Then the dotcom bubble burst, and the
media was writing about out-of-work coders with no options.
Programming skills were in high demand again before long, but the
media was more concerned with the largely make-believe narrative
that programming jobs were all being outsourced to India. So
opportunistic college students are still focused on Wall Street.

Eventually, we're sure, the market will provide. But for now,
first time entrepreneurs are finding that venture cash is much
easier to come by then quality engineering talent. And
experienced engineers are writing their own ticket.